A pretty good day...

I awoke early again today, which gave me an opportunity to get some stuff done before leaving in plenty of time to arrive for my follow-up appointment and chemo session #7.

After my vitals were taken, I found myself a corner and did some taiji while I waited for the nurse to call my name.

The actual follow-up was short and, let me tell you, was it sweet! The principal good news is that things that should be getting smaller are getting smaller or disappearing, and the metastases in the bone tissue remains stable.

The chemo went very well, too.

It started, naturally, with a "stick," which I tried to meditate away (i.e., dismiss any associated pain from my mind and concentrate on my breathing), and I either succeeded, or the nurse taking care of me slipped the needle right between nerve endings.

I mention this only because yesterday's "stick" was quite painful; so much so that I involuntarily lifted a leg from the floor. The nurse commiserated with me but then attempted to explain why it had been so painful (it was a fairly large-diamter needle), and I basically let her, because (I thought to myself) it wasn't my week to be going around and explaining her flawed reasoning (at times, it seems I've had more needles of various size—including the size she used to enable injection of the CT scan contrast—pass through the surface of my skin than the Bayeux Tapestry).

Once I was again a free man, I drove over to Hare Repair, because they had recommended a place "right across the street" to repaint the Honda's roof, where wide swaths of the coating had cracked and left the paint layer exposed to the weather. I experienced sticker shock when I heard the proposed price, but since then, I've determined that (a) Hondas like the one I drive experience this kind of environmental (sun + heat) damage, which really has nothing to do with the price, and (b) the price is actually on the low end of what's available out there among shops that publish prices online.

Tomorrow, I plan to take the car to a few local well-reviewed places to get prices and see what options I have.

Cheers...

RIP, Glenn Campbell

There was a time, several years ago, when I was constructing a set of names to be used in a memory system I was working on, I needed a male singer whose work lay in, roughly, the country–pop-folk spectrum, and I gave serious consideration to the name Neil Diamond, as the name fit certain phonetic criteria I'd settled on.

The only problem was, I could not recall a single song of Diamond's off the top of my head, and I had no idea what Diamond's face looked like, so including him in a memory system didn't make much sense.

So I ditched the phonetic criteria for this single instance only and settled on... Glenn Campbell, whose music I considered to lie in roughly the same spectrum (if I am mistaken, so be it), and more important, whose Wichita Lineman was securely burned into my consciousness because back when my Marine Corps MOS was 2511 (wireman, in my era; today, it's been changed to 0612, field wireman), I trained to acquire pole climbing skill—one in which, in the end, I was proud to have gained experience—and Campbell's song sort of became a "mascot" tune for me, linked in my mind to that skill. And so, in system, my image for number 27 is the fella wearing rhinestone-studded jeans (Rhinestone Cowboy was another of Campbell's hits) while singing, playing a guitar, and wearing climbers.

I enjoyed quite a number of Campbell's other songs, too, including Gentle On My Mind and By The Time I Get To Phoenix in particular.

Sorry to see you go, Glen.

Memento Mori...